


Namesake

by rktho_writes



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Neglect, References to Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008), Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 10:27:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29400525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rktho_writes/pseuds/rktho_writes
Summary: The daughter of a Kaleesh war hero has a grievously neglected childhood.
Relationships: Grievous | Qymaen jai Sheelal &; Original Character, Grievous | Qymaen jai Sheelal/Ronderu lij Kummar
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	Namesake

Her father chose her name. But even then, he couldn’t be bothered to pay her any attention. It was clear her father only cared for two things: power, and the woman he’d named her after, long dead before she was born. Her mother said her father died that day too, and she had married a dead man.  
  
He looked the part more and more every day. First his arms were traded for skeletal appendages that could crush a mumuu’s neck. Then new legs, strong enough to leap over the highest barriers. His mask— his unpainted mask of pure white bone— began to look more and more as if it were his own skull.  
  
She had her father’s gift. She saw the woman in her dreams. And every time her father’s dream shadow would wail and demand of the gods why he had not been slain in her place, she would ask the gods the same question.  
  
When her father left for good, she almost didn’t notice. He was barely home anyway. His exploits, not his presence, filled the family home; the news the wives would trade, the bloody stories of slaughter and vengeance. War broke out through the galaxy, and in the holograms she saw him on the front lines, utterly unrecognizable— and yet, to his wives and children, who had seen the beginning of his tortured path, there was no mistaking him.  
  
She saw it in a dream the night before the war ended. Bathed in fire, flame shooting from his sockets from a well-placed shot to his empty heart. He was mourned by many on Kalee, honored for his valiant crusade against the Jedi— but his wives shed no tears, and his children did not pray for him. Nevertheless, he ascended.  
  
She visited the woman’s shrine some time after. Taking a knife to her scalp, she left her hair and her swords at the feet of the statue, along with her name. A name that had never been her own. A name her father had bestowed on her but never uttered in her presence. She left it, and with it, the legacy she could never fulfill.  
  
When her father’s shrine was built, the worshippers who made the yearly pilgrimage sensed something odd about his hunched posture. He had always hunched, ever since he had become almost completely machine, for his increased height necessitated stooping. But now it seemed as though he shrank. He shrank from those eyes that glowered with sadness and disgust. He had been a great warrior, they could not deny; but for all his greatness, it seemed that Ronderu, in particular, would always be disappointed in the father he had never been.


End file.
